Adam Epstein, a one-time lawyer, who now calls himself a professional recreational athlete, is hoping to bring rec sports fans together with a new social media platform.

The founder of Huddlers Inc. was travelling around Europe after his law school graduation in 2010 on a personal mission to play pick-up basketball in as many countries as he could when he got the idea for the site. The Toronto native met other passionate hoopsters on public ball courts in France, Spain and the Netherlands and found himself soliciting information as to which courts were a must-play.

At first he said he thought it was only him and his jock friends that wanted to share these kinds of tips, but then he began to see the value in the niche information. “I realized it’s an international phenomenon because sport is an international phenomenon and people bond over it and you develop connections,” Mr. Epstein said.

To get his business off the ground Mr. Epstein turned to an increasingly used strategy called bootstrapping. After Europe, he moved back in with his parents to dedicate what little money he had saved up to his new business. “All my law-school friends now have sick apartments and condos and I’m living in my parents’ basement, biking over here,” he said.

But bootstrapped successes often start in basements — consider office-solution software company Freshbooks Inc., which was founded by Mike McDerment in 2003, and now has 4.5 million users worldwide.

“Literally, the team was in the basement of Mike’s parents’ house and that’s where the business happened. Great ideas start in garages and in basements and they start with people working against dreams on nights and weekends,” said Stuart MacDonald, Freshbooks’ chief marketing and revenue officer.

Bootstrapping is more possible than ever as tech startups get off the ground with limited capital, ultimately allowing the founders to maintain control by avoiding capital investment altogether, or using bootstrapped success to prove to investors the company knows its way around.

To finance his startup, Mr. Epstein did small legal jobs for family and friends this past year. “I’m the most overqualified traffic attorney you could possibly find,” he joked.

He also took out a line of credit using his professional designation to build the site.

Huddlers launches this month and will provide athletes and teams with a platform for co-ordinating events and games. With data and functions related to the “who, what and where,” Mr. Epstein said Huddlers covers the rec sports ecosystem.

Through the use of creative financing and personal sacrifices, bootstrapping can shape the culture and direction of a new company.

Online portfolio system 4ormat, which allows creative professionals to showcase their work, has bootstrapped since its founders started working on it part time in 2008 and has no plans to seek outside investment. “We just saw this as a business we could grow organically at a sustainable pace where we can scale up the business as it grows,” co-founder Tyler Rooney said.

The company made an important strategic decisions as a result of its bootstrapped model. To save more than $100,000, 4ormat decided to skip Internet Explorer, opting to only allow users to access its service through Mozilla’s Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.

“What’s more important is to prove that this is a product people will use and want,” Mr. Rooney said, adding the decision to scrap a major browser was validated when no users complained about the lack of compatibility.

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, said it’s not cheaper to get a company going today, but the modern tech startup has increased access to key resources.

Contemporary companies benefit from “rentorship of the means of production,” Mr. Ries said, referring to the old Marxist theory that those who own the means of production will perpetually make up society’s ruling class. “So, if you have a credit card and $100 you can rent the kind of cloud infrastructure that even 10 years ago, let alone 20, would have required a massive build out of a physical data centre.

“It’s a levelling of the playing field between guys that have $100 and $100-million because you can compete as a direct competitor with the biggest companies in the world, globally, from day one, on almost no money,” he said.

Ottawa-based Shopify Inc. — a platform that allows users to build an online store — has embraced this “democratization” of entrepreneurship.

“I don’t have to go and build some huge brick-and mortar-retail store. I can sell to a global audience, there’s no rent I have to pay, there’s no payroll,” said Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s chief platform officer.

Founded in 2005, Shopify bootstrapped for years before taking financing. “That has set the tone for the culture of our company. We still don’t spend foolishly and we are still very conservative,” Mr. Finkelstein said.

The company became profitable in 2008 and continued to bootstrap until it received $7-million in a round funding in 2010. Then a subsequent $15-million capital influx in 2011 helped it acquire mobile app-maker Select Start Studios earlier this year.

Mr. Finkelstein calls bootstrapping the “Swiss Army knife” approach to startups, requiring creative use of limited resources. One such resource he pointed to is access to free marketing channels including Twitter and Facebook.

For companies that eventually seek outside funding, it helps to be able to prove yourself resourceful. “That bootstrapping stage will show whomever you are trying to get money from that you will do all the right things with that money and that you are fiscally responsible,” said Huddlers’ Mr. Epstein.

A survey of emerging software companies published by PricewaterhouseCooper this month found that 44% of respondents said they did not try to seek funding last year, two-thirds of which said they had adequate revenue to cover costs.

Founders who resist venture capital retain total control of their ventures, which is why Freshbooks and 4ormat stuck to the bootstrapping model.

“We set out to be the masters of our own domain, not just for ourselves, but for our customers,” Freshbooks’ Mr. MacDonald said.

That’s because the founders didn’t want any investors messing with its customer-experience focused strategy. “Someone who is pure financial investor could potentially look at in and say ‘wow that’s cost. We need to do something about that,’ ” he said.

If Friday's gains are anything to go by, investors are champing at the bit

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